Today's 20-somethings could learn a thing or two from Alice McDermott. Her novels amount to an astringent antidote to the fun-loving, just-do-it ethos of immediate gratification that makes contemporary youth seem so callow.

"Someone," McDermott's new novel, follows one Irish-American family's migration from Brooklyn in the '30s to the Queens and Long Island of the '60s. Even as a child, the book's narrator, Marie, learns that life is unfair and unpredictable. A teenage neighbor suddenly drops dead; a bride is jilted; her best friend's mother dies in childbirth.

Still, she is cradled in an unmistakable cocoon of innocence. "When he leaned to kiss me," the teenage Marie reports, "it was both my first real kiss and my first taste of beer." In the next minute, the boy is fondling her breast, and more. McDermott's spot-on description of her reaction makes room not only for pathos but comedy: "Of course, I had seen women nursing babies. ... He breathed deeply, like an infant. ... I felt his saliva turn cold on my skin."

Marie's blue-collar world of laundry on the fire escape and stickball on the streets will remind some readers of Colm Tóibín's overpraised novel "Brooklyn." But McDermott makes her central character a far more intriguing personality. If Tóibín's Eilis is all too earnest and plodding, Marie proudly proclaims herself "a bold piece."

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'Someone'

By Alice McDermott. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 232 pps., $25.

In contrast to her brother, Gabe, a declaimer of poetry destined for the priesthood, she is dubbed "our little pagan." With a wink and a nod, her father includes little Marie on the pub visits he hides from his wife. When her mother tries to teach her how to bake soda bread, Marie resists, knowing that if she learns, baking will be added to her chores. Henceforth, she's not only a pagan but "the most stubborn child."

That stubborn independence, along with Gabe's comforting, will go a long way to keep her afloat after being rejected by the boy who offered that first kiss. After proposing marriage and stringing her along for months, he stuns Marie by announcing his decision to marry another girl, one with money. Like the heroine of McDermott's previous novel, "After This," Marie feels unloved and unlovable. "Who will love me," she asks Gabe. "Someone," he replies, with a certainty that belies experience.

When Marie goes to work at a mortuary, she will learn yet more about heartbreak. The boss hires this sensitive young woman as "consoling angel" to his grieving clients. But here, McDermott shows her wit, naming the undertaker Mr. Fagin. He knows his Dickens and knows that he's no villain but a sweetheart blessed with a sense of humor. For the author, Fagin is a vehicle for embodying both life's depths and delightful shallows.

Every page of this book implies that Marie's "someone" isn't a single person. Family and friends form our ultimate safety nets, bulwarks against life's inevitable storms. Gabe is one. Mr. Fagin is one. Tom Commeford, the man she marries, is another.

In pursuing this theme, plot is subordinate to epiphany. McDermott doesn't tell a story so much as offer glimpses of Marie at various stages of her life. Scenes expand from simple exposition to unexpected revelation.

McDermott's carefully chiseled, unadorned prose creates many miraculous moments. "Someone" is another masterly performance by a sublime artist of the quotidian.